Ihave always thought of it as an inside joke. A sardonic, Spanky-and-Our-Gang
password to unlock the clubhouse door. There was something playfully
subversive yet purposely archaic about it, even in my student days before
the fall of the Berlin Wall, the scourge of AIDS, and the rise of the
religious right. That its irony was largely lost on the outside world
only reinforced the secret confederacy. For me, “communism, atheism,
free love” efficiently conveyed the private experience and shared
history of a community that clearly cherished its right to personal freedom
and radical dissent. That it did so with verbal aikido—confidently
flipping a derogatory slur back on its intolerant attackers—made
flaunting it half the fun.

Exactly when the phrase was coined is not clear. Variations on “communism,
atheism, free love,” were bandied about in the national press throughout
the 1910s and ’20s, mostly as conservative shorthand for perceived
threats to the American status quo, especially those posed by liberal
institutions. The word “atheism” was often linked with “communism” as
a disparaging qualifier of Marxist ideals. “Free love” originated
in the mid-nineteenth century to challenge the rights of ownership and
authority exercised by men over women in marriage. By the early twentieth
century the term had evolved to stand for a range of sexual freedoms
for women.

The outspoken opposition of Reed’s founding president, William T.
Foster, to U.S. entry into World War I made the college a natural target
for the label. Other peculiarities about the college helped it stick.
When a national survey in 1917 reported that the majority of college
coeds listed financial affluence as their primary requirement of a suitable
mate, the Oregonian decided to survey Reed coeds. Consistent with the
college’s nonconformist image, Reed women ranked intellect as their
number-one criterion in a mate. Specifically, that the man be their intellectual
equal. They also stipulated that he be a feminist, “one who will
stand for equal rights in both political and domestic matters.”

Reed’s adherence to academic freedom also raised hackles. Soon after
the Russian Revolution, radicalized workers such as the Wobblies (Industrial
Workers of the World) took to the streets, calling for a socialist or
anarchist revolution. A red terror spread throughout the country—except
at Reed. There, a prominent leader of the Socialist Party of America
was invited to campus to discuss the revolution’s potential impact
on militarism, emancipation of women, and ending the persecution of Jews.

As Portland grew increasingly hostile toward the college, the Reed community
circled the wagons and turned inward. Ellen Knowlton Johnson ’39,
daughter of longtime Reed physics professor Tony Knowlton, grew up on
campus. She told me that during the 1920s, the Reed community reclaimed “communism,
atheism, free love” from local critics as a tongue-in-cheek slogan.
This was confirmed by other alumni of the era.

The second Red Scare in the 1950s brought the Velde Committee to Reed
to investigate alleged Communist infiltration, reinforcing the college’s
association with the slogan. In the wake of the committee’s hearings,
a Quest editorial took issue with fallout from the “facetious motto”—not
for the political notoriety it cast upon the college, but for the wild
rumors of free love that led Reed’s trustees to clamp down on dorm
inter-visitation between the sexes. In the late 1960s, t-shirts featuring
the Reed griffin seal emblazoned with “communism, atheism, free
love” served to elevate the slogan from oral transmission to broadly-disseminated
iconography.

Some alumni have told me that they would like to see the slogan retired.
After nearly 100 years of usage, they consider it an anachronism that
no longer speaks for Reed, and instead places the college in a polarizing
stance to the outside world. That, however, has been precisely its purpose
all along. As Burton Clark points out in The Distinctive College, the
spirit of intellectual rebellion upon which Reed was founded demands
that the community “continue to define itself in ways antithetical
to those of outsiders.” To that end, the slogan has become, for
better or worse, part of the Reed “brand.”

According to branding expert David Aakes, neutralizing a brand once it
is established is virtually impossible. One can only hope to include
and transcend it, which is essentially what the Reed community did in
the 1920s when, marginalized for their nonconformity and freedom of expression,
they appropriated “communism, atheism, free love” as their
own.